EUAN is a project for the Info2000 initiative launched by DGXIII of
the
European Commission, responsible for telecommunications and the
information
market. Info2000 called for multi-national, public-private sector
partnerships with imaginative projects to exploit public sector
information.

EUAN is about opening up access to archives across the European Union.
The
underlying vision is that a citizen should be able, using Internet, to
get
information about the contents of the national archives of another
country
of the Union. At present geographical, language and cultural barriers
impede this.

The archives of the partners contain a wealth of information from the
11th
century to the 20th, ranging from government files to collections of
private papers of prominent individuals, from records of the Socialist
International to registers of property rights in Scotland and from
Swedish
diplomatic correspondence to the records of the Allied Control
Commission
for Italy. The project will open up access to the top level catalogues
of
all these records.

EUAN will examine both archival questions: how to ensure consistent
description independent of language, and information technology
questions:
how to navigate between different computer systems. The project will
produce a prototype user interface together with reports and guidelines
on
promoting further European standardisation in these areas.

The EUAN partners are:
the National Archives of Scotland (co-ordinator)
the National Archives of Sweden
the National Archives of Italy
the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Scottish Archive Network Ltd
EUAN is an inclusive rather than exclusive project and dissemination and
sharing of results will go far beyond the consortium partners.

The project, which is expected to begin in January1999 and run for 2
years,
is worth approximately 0.5 million ECUs (about USD 0.5 million) of
which
around half will be contributed by the EC.

EUAN will be run in close partnership with other European initiatives,
including another archive project selected in Info2000, the European
Visual
Archive (EVA). It will also work closely with international archival
bodies
including the ICA committees on Information Technology and on
Descriptive
Standards, and will complement the Swiss initiative to provide a common
Internet gateway for European archive websites.